NFL Adds New Wrinkles To Broadband Playbook
By MATT STUMP -- Multichannel News, 9/9/2001 8:00:00 PM
The National Football League kicked off its new season this past weekend by dipping its toe a bit further into the broadband and interactive waters.
In addition to an increasing bevy of broadband content produced by NFL Films for NFL.com, the league is experimenting with Internet polling during each CBS television broadcast, some new links on America Online's AOL TV and a new Web-based, weekly fantasy football league program.
"We have extensive video programming on NFL.com," said NFL Films senior vice president of new media Chris Russo, who noted that the library grows in size each year.
The CBS poll follows a successful test that married the Internet and TV audiences during Super Bowl XXXV last January. "It was a very successful feature," Russo said.
During the game, viewers could vote for the Super Bowl MVP through NFL.com. This year, that feature will be part of every CBS broadcast, Russo said. CBS Sports will also report the results.
"We're also in discussions with AOL TV," about adding NFL content to the ITV platform, Russo said.
Over the years, the NFL has built a substantial broadband section on its Web site. Each Sunday night, the league makes available a three-minute video highlight reel for each of the league's 31 teams, Russo said. Those clips are produced by NFL Films, which handles video production for the three-minute packages.
The broadband portion of the NFL site also includes historical video clips, weekly player profiles and game previews, for a total of 50 to 75 original pieces per week.
The site also houses the live audio Webcasts of each week's NFL game, as well as live and archival audio pre- and post-game wrap-ups from local radio stations, coaches' press conferences and other events.
"We do some live video Webcasting," Russo said, referring to the fantasy football league show that is replacing a preview show hosted last year by Ron Jaworksi and Merrill Hoge.
On the ITV side, the NFL will work with ABC, now in its the third year of its enhanced Monday Night Football and ESPN Sunday Night Football telecasts. Viewers can view real-time statistics, polling, chat and other information on nfl.com during each ABC or ESPN game.
Last season, more than 3.4 million total viewers experienced enhanced TV-football programming. ESPN's Sunday-night games generated an average of 108,000 nightly users, while ABC's Monday Night Football received an average of 70,000 nightly users. Both telecasts generated average connection times of 42 minutes.
The staples of ABC's enhanced TV content — live stats, extra information delivered in the push channel and the PrimeTime player game — will return, said ABC vice president and general manager of enhanced TV Rick Mandler.
In the PrimeTime player game, viewers can choose a player and guess how many yards he'll get on the next play. Enhanced-TV viewers can also vote on coaches' instant-replay challenges.
Mandler said the football version of enhanced TV is "a little profitable. We sell advertising. We try to get the TV advertisers to become the sponsors of the interactive application, by selling entitlements and individual synched units."
Programmers are increasingly building content for synchronous TV and PC viewing.
"The two-screen solution allows you to reach the most homes," said Russo of the NFL's interactive experience to date. "That's the most significant reach.
"There may be some value to experimenting with one screen platforms even though they don't have much penetration," Russo added, referring to AOL TV. "It's certainly worthwhile to experiment."
AOL Plus, the online service's broadband offering, will help promote NFL Films and NFL.com this fall as part of the league's new Internet deal with AOL Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. and Viacom's CBS SportsLine. As part of that deal, the media players paid the NFL a rights fee and can sell advertising on various portions of the site.
"In general, we'll be providing more video content" to NFL.com, Russo said. The site will feature more content specific to individual teams, with more search functionality to better serve fans, he said.
Local teams are also expanding their broadband content. The New England Patriots, for instance, worked with e-Media to redesign the team's Web site. It now features a nightly Patriots video-news show, live press conferences and other video and audio streaming content.
The effort by the Pats is an outgrowth of an initiative the NFL assembled 18 months to provide some commonality to each team's Web site, while leaving other basic editorial and ad-sales decisions to the local teams.
The clubs can tap into NFL Films video and customize material as they see fit, even going beyond the three-minute highlights package to, say, a 10-minute highlight segment.
The NFL, perhaps more than any other sports league, has been systematically encoding its content. Business models aside, Russo said "certainly the goal and effort is being made toward making NFL Films library more available to more fans. We're taking a leading role in indexing and digitizing a good percentage of the library.
"The focus is how can we take that wonderful library and provided more of it to fans in a customized way, whether that's through the PC, cable systems, wireless devices, or wherever the technology goes."
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